Virginia: Swamps & Split Levels

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Colonel William E. Byrd, the colonial ancestor of Virginia's Senator Harry F. Byrd, named the place the Great Dismal Swamp. After trekking through the muck and mire with a band of hardy surveyors, Byrd emerged bug-bitten almost to death (the Dismal Swamp's yellow fly, they still say, will politely lift a man's hat from his head so as to get a better bite at his ears). The swamp, straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border, just across the James River Bay from Norfolk, was nothing better than a "filthy bogg," he wrote. Even birds would not fly over "this horrible desart for fear of the noisome exhalations that rise from this vast body of dirt and nastiness."

After Byrd came George Washington, who saw a chance to make a buck out of the bogs. Washington bought up a chunk of the swamp, organized a company called "Adventurers for Draining the Great Dismal Swamp," put slaves to work building a canal, which is still in use. It was profitless. Washington finally sold the land to Lighthorse Harry Lee for $20,000, but when Lee could not meet the payments, the property reverted to Washington and was sold with Washington's estate in 1828 for $12,000.

Where the Father of Our Country had failed, who would take a financial chance? Previews, Inc., that's who. Previews, Inc. is a real estate firm that, with associated companies, has purchased about 160,000 acres of Dismal Swampland, is turning some of it into farm land, hopes to sell more to housing developers for Norfolk's spreading population.

Creeping Splits. Previews, Inc.'s effort has conservationists, swamp lovers, hunters and bird watchers so mad they could swat a lepidoptera. They are lyric in their descriptions of the Great Dismal Swamp as a primeval forest of peat bog, cypress and juniper trees, of diaphanous curtains of Spanish moss, of copperhead and rattlesnake, bear, deer and mink, and of quicksand. The swamp once covered 1,500 sq. mi. But modern civilization's bulldozers have cut it down to some 600 sq. mi. Now even to the Great Dismal Swamp comes the forward tread of split-levelism.

Well, it does seem a pity. The Great Dismal Swamp story has a shuddery, compelling quality. Thomas Moore, after seeing the swamp's saucer-shaped Lake Drummond, wrote a ballad about a young man who went mad over the death of his beloved:

They made her a grave too cold and damp

For a soul so warm and true:

And she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,

Where all night long, by a firefly lamp, She paddles her white canoe.

Medicine Chest. On the fringes of the swamp live veteran trappers and guides who can recite the ballad without missing a beat, and who know every legend about the dark mysteryland. The swamp water is perfectly potable and is famed for its long-staying qualities of freshness, but it looks as if it had been pumped from an outhouse. For years, the swamp's vegetation was supposed to be an unequaled medicine chest. The pale blue hepatica, with leaves shaped like the lobes of the liver, was good for any liver disorder. Virginia Bluebell cured chest ailments. The common yellow yarrow was standard treatment for toothache.